ViCE Workshop on Provisioning of Virtual Research Environments and Data Management

The first day of the workshop started with presentations and live demos by Jonathan Bauer on "Current developements in bwLehrpool" and the convergence of VM building and PXE booting in bwLehrpool context as well as the provisioning of the major container technologies Docker and Singularity (Beta) on that platform. Björn Grüning of Prof. Backofen's group in Freiburg and associated to the de.NBI project (German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure) demonstrated practical computational reproducibility in the life sciences. The session was followed by Oleg Stobbe from the CiTAR projecton current developments in VRE frameworks. The first session got closed by Christopher Hauser from Ulm University by a presentation of ViCE Registry project.

The afternoon session was dedicated to a hacking sessions on ViCE Registry, ways of VRE building (Container/VM) and the access to research data (Research Data Management). The second day clarified the distinction between provisioning of VRE (ViCE) and re-usability of VRE (CiTAR) as well as defined some (lightweight) guidelines for the creation of VRE and VRE workflows. Several existing usecases (HEP, computational chemistry, bioinformatics, bioconda for HPC) in different disciplines got discussed and evaluated for further uptake. Additionally, external dependencies (services, hardware, data sources and sinks, ...) of VREs were summarized. The workshop produced a good overview on the current state of developments in that field.